The advantages of brick walls for houses and other buildings have long been recognised. Many owners of buildings having timber walls often wish to construct brick outer walls (or "cladding") for the building. However, known brick cladding methods are time consuming, labour intensive, and relatively expensive.
Normally, it is necessary to dig a trench around the building, close to the existing walls, in order to provide footings for the brick wall to be erected. Since water pipes, gas and/or electricity lines, telephone lines and other utilities are often located underground leading to the building, the construction of those footing trench requires the interruption of the services. Moreover, these service lines may be inadvertently cut or ruptured when digging the trench.
The footing trench also interferes with access to the building.
Another problem associated with such footing trenches is the weakening or removal of support for the existing building.
Trench footings are not recommended for reactive soils, such as clay, as the movement of the soil with changing environmental conditions causes movement of the foundations, and hence the brick wall supported by the foundations. This leads to cracking, and possible failure of the brick wall.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an improved method of constructing a brick wall, particularly but not solely for use as a cladding wall, which overcomes or ameliorates the abovedescribed disadvantages, or which at least provides the builder with a useful choice.